Low attendance means UMass football program $700,000 short of expectation, says AD John McCutcheon

Empty seats at Gillette Stadium have cost the UMass athletic department in the 2012 football season.Associated Press

AMHERST – Swaths of empty seats at Gillette Stadium for University of Massachusetts football games were always an expectation.

That doesn’t mean that the school’s athletic director is happy with attendance, however, as the team gets set for its season finale Friday against Central Michigan.

As part of a wide-ranging “state of the union” interview about the UMass football program, Athletic Director John McCutcheon said attendance at Gillette Stadium has been short of his expectations.

The Minutemen have averaged 11,963 fans per game in their first four games of the FBS era, about half of what UMass officials had said their goal was in July.

“If there was one probably disappointing thing this season, it’s that we didn’t quite get the numbers that we had hoped for,” McCutcheon said. “I think it’s something we can build on, but it is a little lower than we had hoped and thought it would be.”

The lack of attendance has left the program with a $700,000 financial shortfall, which McCutcheon said his department reported to the Faculty Senate last week.

“We’ll continue to try to offset that through the balance of the fiscal year in terms of additional donation dollars that we can put toward it, and that kind of thing,” McCutcheon said. “We want to be as transparent with all of our different constituents both on-campus and off as to where we are. That’s our responsibility to deal with it in the short term and the long term, and we’ll figure out how to do that.”

If the department can’t make that up with donations – which seems unlikely since it only brought in a total of $656,374 across all sports in 2011 – McCutcheon said that could at least partially be made up next season because of the $1.5 million net gain the program will get in 2013 from trips to Wisconsin and Kansas State, up from $675,000 this season, along with an extra home game.

“It will be debt that we’ll have to deal with. When we look to next year, we’re in pretty good shape already, just because of the two guarantee games we have,” McCutcheon said. “We’re pretty much in a real solid financial situation for next year just in that component alone. Plus we have six home games as opposed to five.”

Full financial data from the 2012 football season should become available early in 2013.

McCutcheon said the department will do a thorough self-examination of its practices – as it does every year – that will include an assessment of its marketing agreement with the Gold Group of Salem. The Gold Group contract is up after this season, and McCutcheon said, “we’ll see where that goes” when asked whether it would be extended.

“We had a very comprehensive advertising and marketing campaign,” McCutcheon said. “I think it’s just really breaking through with something new like this, and getting people aware of it, and getting them to change habits and try it. It just takes a while. You have to really keep working at it.”

Nothing, of course, puts fans in the seats like winning games. McCutcheon, who was on the sidelines for the program’s first FBS win against Akron on Nov. 10, said the chances of a winless season, in his mind, was not out of the question.

“It was always a possibility from when we started out on this. Really, you don’t have reason to expect that it wouldn’t be. We’re not out there with the same resources and experience that the teams we’re playing have,” McCutcheon said. “When you look at it from an analytical standpoint, why would you think that you do have a chance to get a win at this stage of the process?”

McCutcheon said he expects it to take five to seven years for UMass to fully adapt to competing at the FBS level. That timetable is tied directly into the completion of the new football building, the construction of which will begin in March 2013 and is expected to be finished in July 2014.

“Some folks might read that and say, ‘What do you mean, we’re not going to win for seven years?’ No. We’re going to be getting better and better and better through the course of that whole period,” McCutcheon said. “Really, until you go through a cycle, and a cycle that has the support facilities in place like the building that puts us on a more even keel recruiting-wise, that’s the kind of timeline you’re looking that.”

McCutcheon praised head coach Charley Molnar not just for his ability to get that first victory, but also to hold his team to the standards academically that he promised during the interview process.

“You talk about them with a lot of coaches, and sometimes those conversations, how they translate into reality, and at what level, can vary quite a bit,” McCutcheon said. “I think Charley has done a fantastic job of setting the tone with the team of what’s going to be acceptable and what isn’t going to be acceptable.”

Ultimately, McCutcheon said he’s been nervous at times during this inaugural FBS season, but that comes with the territory.

“I think you have anxiety no matter what you do. I’d have anxiety if we had not made the transition,” McCutcheon said. “It just comes along with what we do.” 